Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC) which for ACM is $1450 in 2026 and expected to go up. Authors from lower-middle income countries get a discount. [1]
Authors are often associated with institutions (e.g. universities) who can cover the APC on behalf of the author through a deal with the journal. For the institution, now instead of paying the subscriber fee and publishing for free, they pay a publishing fee and everyone reads for free.
Journals receive papers for free, peer review is free, the only expenses are hosting a .pdf and maintaining an automated peer review system. I would've understood $14.50 but where does the two orders of magnitude higher number come from?
That’s not the only option, though. There is also institutional membership, which is basically the same as the previous subscription model, just pitched the other way around. Authors whose institutions are members don’t have to pay the processing charge.
> Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC)
Just to be clear this is specifically _gold open access_. There are other options like green (author can make article available elsewhere for free) and diamond (gold with no charge).
The computer science that matters the most today —- machine learning, vision, NLP —- is open access without the fees because the main confs are not ACM. (Vision has some in IEEE.)
I guess the ACM fees are paying for stupid things like the new AI summaries.
I've been in academia for more decades than I'd like to state, and I have never heard of an institute that covered article processing charges. I work in a natural science. Maybe things are different in computing fields, though.
I think this APC system is terrible -- it's enshrining the principle that publication in ACM venues is only open to researchers in institutions that are rich enough to cover the publication cost (or be recognized as lower-middle income). Of course this is already mostly the case, and it is already the case with conferences and their expensive registration fees; but we will stand no chance of ever improving on that front if journal article authors get charged >$1000.
Compare this to diamond OA journals (e.g., in my field, https://theoretics.episciences.org/ or https://lmcs.episciences.org/) where reading and publishing is free for everyone. Of course, the people publishing in these journals are mostly academics from wealthy universities, but I think it's important that other authors can submit and publish there too.
This is huge. A lot of these are the underpinnings of modern computer science optimizations. The ACM programming competitions in college are some of my fondest memories!
Conflicted. Obviously open access is great, but it's never been that difficult to find most papers either on arxiv or the author's website. And I despise the idea of paying to publish, especially since unlike other fields the "processing" required for CS papers is minimal (e.g., we handle our own formatting). FWIW, USENIX conference papers are both open access and free to publish.
My understanding is that this is at least to some degree in response to the surge of AI generated/assisted papers.
I used to work for a small publisher some years ago, and while this is true to some degree, we spent a lot of effort doing additional formatting or correcting formatting mistakes. For a typical journal publication, this process alone takes weeks if you're aiming at a high-quality publication.
On top of that, there are a lot of small things that you typically don't get if a paper is just put on the author's website, such as e.g. long-term archiving, a DOI, integration with services like dblp, metadata curation, etc.
Now, to what degree these features are an added value to you personally varies from person to person. Some people or even workshops are totally fine with simply publishing the PDFs written by the authors on a website, and there's nothing wrong with that, ymmv.
Just friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money (part of grant money goes to that). That's because as another commenter says now authors pays high fees (thousands of dollars) in advance, while at the same time peer reviewers and sometimes even editors are not paid. And of course in neither case (open or closed access) authors get a dime.
I like the way that people add “a friendly reminder” like they’re just jogging your memory of a well known fact.
Publishers have been fighting OA for an incredibly long time. They are not foisting this on people because it’s a new great scheme they’ve come up with, they have been pushed to do it.
Ok that's good but ... what exactly will be open accessed?
Do they keep a lot of what is important or interesting? I
really don't know right now. They should have also added
the relevancy of that announcement; right now I just don't
know what will all be opened, so I hope to find this information
in the comments here.
Are you going to reverse your nonsense "these publications already come with a summary, so we've added a worse, AI generated summary and making that the first thing you see instead" decision though?
I wish there were more open discussions about how "Journal Impact Factor" came to be so important.
It seems absurd that researchers fret about where to submit their work and are subsequently judged on the impact of said work based in large part on a metric privately controlled by Clarivate Analytics (via Web of Science/Journal Citation Reports).
A lot of discussion about the benefits/drawbacks of open access publishing, but I don't see anybody talking about the other thing that's coming along with this commitment to open access: the ACM is introducing a "premium" membership tier behind which various features of the Digital Library will be paywalled. From their info page [0], "premium" features include:
* Access to the ACM Guide to Computing Machinery
* AI-generated article summaries
* Podcast-style summaries of conference sessions
* Advanced search
* Rich article metadata, including download metrics, index terms and citations received
* Bulk citation exports and PDF downloads
The AI-generated article summaries has been getting a lot of discussion in my social circles. They have apparently fed many (all?) papers into some LLM to generate summaries... which is absurd when you consider that practically every article has an abstract as part of its text and submission. These abstract were written by the authors and have been reviewed more than almost any other part of the articles, so they are very unlikely to contain errors. In contrast, multiple of my colleagues have found errors of varying scales in the AI-generated summaries of their own papers — many of which are actually longer than the existing abstracts.
In addition, there are apparently AI-generated summaries for articles that were licensed with a non-derivative-works clause, which means the ACM has breached not just the social expectations of using accurate information, but also the legal expectations placed upon them as publishers of these materials.
I think it's interesting that the ACM is positioning these "premium" features as a necessity due to the move to open-access publishing [1], especially when multiple other top-level comments on this post are discussing how open-access can often be more profitable than closed-access publishing.
[1] The Digital Library homepage (https://dl.acm.org/) features a banner right now that says: "ACM is now Open Access. As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available as the Digital Library Premium Edition."
They also prefix every PDF with a useless page telling you the authors (which are already listed on the first (now second) page anyways) and a list telling you which of the author's universities were members of ACM Open and paid for the publishing via flatrate.
The latter is of course the actual reason for this extra page, but it is also entirely useless information since the people reading the paper don't care. The people writing the paper are also usually annoyed by this (source: I'm an author of one such paper)
CEO of EMS Press here (publisher of the European Mathematical Society). Like most society publishers, we really care about our discipline(s) and want to support researchers regardless of whether they or their institution can afford an astronomical APC or subscription rates.
Good publishing costs money but there are alternatives to the established models. Since 2021 we use the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model where libraries subscribe to journals and at the beginning of each subscription year we check for each journal whether the collected revenues cover our projected costs: if they do we publish that year's content Open Access, otherwise only subscribers have access. So no fees for authors and if libraries put their money where their mouth is then also full OA and thus no barriers to reading. All journals full OA since 2024. Easy.
I don't understand why anyone would want to publish anything, but perhaps that's because I don't need a "reputation".
I also don't understand why anyone would ever want to get a PhD, which is just a manner of exchanging almost free labor for a nearly worthless piece of paper. It's like a participation trophy at this point for people that are not homo economici.
I am doing a PhD (by publication, self-funded) because I want to improve how we are decarbonising home heating in the UK, and one target audience is academics, and those papers also support communications with policy makers and industry. As I have made clear to my supervisors the PhD would be a nice bauble side-effect of this climate fixing work.
There’s some nuance to this surrounding the “creative commons” licensing of these ACM publications.
Open access does not mean Creative Commons license (CC-BY, or CC-BY-NC-ND).
Jan 1 2026, all ACM publications will be open access, but not all will be creative commons.
Per an email I received on April 11th, 2025 from Scott Delman:
“Thank you for your email. All ACM published papers in the ACM DL will be made freely available. All articles published after January 1, 2026 will be governed by a Creative Commons license (either CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND), but ACM will not be retroactively assigning CC licenses to the entire archive of ~800K ACM published papers.”
This is unfortunate, in my opinion, because a lot of the foundational computer science papers fall into that category.
Is this going to include all of their back catalog? I’ve had a lot of free time lately and decided I’ve been missing the SIGPLAN proceedings and have b been procrastinating on reactivating my old membership to get them. I stopped when the paper version went away, which is ages ago now.
54 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 79.5 ms ] threadInstead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC) which for ACM is $1450 in 2026 and expected to go up. Authors from lower-middle income countries get a discount. [1]
Authors are often associated with institutions (e.g. universities) who can cover the APC on behalf of the author through a deal with the journal. For the institution, now instead of paying the subscriber fee and publishing for free, they pay a publishing fee and everyone reads for free.
1. https://authors.acm.org/open-access
Journals receive papers for free, peer review is free, the only expenses are hosting a .pdf and maintaining an automated peer review system. I would've understood $14.50 but where does the two orders of magnitude higher number come from?
Here’s the list of current members: https://libraries.acm.org/acmopen/open-participants
Just to be clear this is specifically _gold open access_. There are other options like green (author can make article available elsewhere for free) and diamond (gold with no charge).
I guess the ACM fees are paying for stupid things like the new AI summaries.
Compare this to diamond OA journals (e.g., in my field, https://theoretics.episciences.org/ or https://lmcs.episciences.org/) where reading and publishing is free for everyone. Of course, the people publishing in these journals are mostly academics from wealthy universities, but I think it's important that other authors can submit and publish there too.
My understanding is that this is at least to some degree in response to the surge of AI generated/assisted papers.
I used to work for a small publisher some years ago, and while this is true to some degree, we spent a lot of effort doing additional formatting or correcting formatting mistakes. For a typical journal publication, this process alone takes weeks if you're aiming at a high-quality publication.
On top of that, there are a lot of small things that you typically don't get if a paper is just put on the author's website, such as e.g. long-term archiving, a DOI, integration with services like dblp, metadata curation, etc.
Now, to what degree these features are an added value to you personally varies from person to person. Some people or even workshops are totally fine with simply publishing the PDFs written by the authors on a website, and there's nothing wrong with that, ymmv.
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3197520
Publishers have been fighting OA for an incredibly long time. They are not foisting this on people because it’s a new great scheme they’ve come up with, they have been pushed to do it.
It seems absurd that researchers fret about where to submit their work and are subsequently judged on the impact of said work based in large part on a metric privately controlled by Clarivate Analytics (via Web of Science/Journal Citation Reports).
In addition, there are apparently AI-generated summaries for articles that were licensed with a non-derivative-works clause, which means the ACM has breached not just the social expectations of using accurate information, but also the legal expectations placed upon them as publishers of these materials.
I think it's interesting that the ACM is positioning these "premium" features as a necessity due to the move to open-access publishing [1], especially when multiple other top-level comments on this post are discussing how open-access can often be more profitable than closed-access publishing.
[0] https://dl.acm.org/premium
[1] The Digital Library homepage (https://dl.acm.org/) features a banner right now that says: "ACM is now Open Access. As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available as the Digital Library Premium Edition."
Also AI-generated, presumably.
The latter is of course the actual reason for this extra page, but it is also entirely useless information since the people reading the paper don't care. The people writing the paper are also usually annoyed by this (source: I'm an author of one such paper)
Good publishing costs money but there are alternatives to the established models. Since 2021 we use the Subscribe to Open (S2O) model where libraries subscribe to journals and at the beginning of each subscription year we check for each journal whether the collected revenues cover our projected costs: if they do we publish that year's content Open Access, otherwise only subscribers have access. So no fees for authors and if libraries put their money where their mouth is then also full OA and thus no barriers to reading. All journals full OA since 2024. Easy.
I also don't understand why anyone would ever want to get a PhD, which is just a manner of exchanging almost free labor for a nearly worthless piece of paper. It's like a participation trophy at this point for people that are not homo economici.
Open access does not mean Creative Commons license (CC-BY, or CC-BY-NC-ND).
Jan 1 2026, all ACM publications will be open access, but not all will be creative commons.
Per an email I received on April 11th, 2025 from Scott Delman:
“Thank you for your email. All ACM published papers in the ACM DL will be made freely available. All articles published after January 1, 2026 will be governed by a Creative Commons license (either CC-BY or CC-BY-NC-ND), but ACM will not be retroactively assigning CC licenses to the entire archive of ~800K ACM published papers.”
This is unfortunate, in my opinion, because a lot of the foundational computer science papers fall into that category.
#FreeAlanTuring